Terence Tao

It doesn't feel like it's in motion.

And the biggest advances, Darwin's theory of evolution is the idea that species are not static.

But it's not obvious because you don't see evolution in your lifetime.

Well, now we actually can, but it seems permanent and static.

Right now we're going through a cognitive version of the Copernican Revolution where we used to think that human intelligence is the center of the universe.

And now we're actually seeing that there's very different types of intelligence that are out there with very different strengths and weaknesses.

And so our assessment of which tasks require intelligence, which ones don't, has to be reordered quite a bit.

And so, you know, trying to fit AI into sort of our theories of scientific progress and what is hard and what is easy, we're struggling quite a lot.

We have to ask questions that we've never really had to ask before.

Or maybe the philosophers had, but now we all have to deal with it.

I think one aspect of science is it's not just creating a new theory and validating it, but communicating it to others.

So Darwin was actually an amazing science communicator.

He wrote in English, in natural language, I'm speaking like a...

Okay.

Yeah, okay.

I have to sort of get out of my technical mindset.

He spoke in plain English.

You know, didn't use equations.

And he synthesized a lot of disparate facts.

So, you know, little pieces of evolution had been worked out in the past, but he had this very compelling...